Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay!” 

What is the value of training your sales team? Is it a waste of time or is it time well spent? Study, after study, after study continues to show that most company meetings are unproductive and a waste of time… Harvard Business Review, 71% of senior managers said meetings are unproductive and inefficient; Inc. Magazine, 90 percent of employees feel meetings are “costly” and “unproductive; and the list goes on and on.

Let’s be honest. It’s rare when someone says they enjoy and look forward to regular sales or training meetings, including the person responsible for putting the meetings together. Creating good, productive training sessions, especially on a regular basis, is not easy.

There are a few key elements to conducting more productive meetings so that your employees get more out of them, and also to help you make them more enjoyable.

One of the most important rules to follow regardless of whether it’s in person or via video is to lighten up. Make them fun, informative, and entertaining! The main reason meetings are so unpopular is that they are no fun, they’re boring, redundant and unfortunately, most reps will say, they are a waste of time.

The irony is that properly planned and focused training meetings can be one of the most productive, unifying, and motivating uses of everyone’s time in your organization.

Your people are one of the most valuable marketing assets you have, yet many businesses treat employee meetings with these resources as necessary evils rather than opportunities to enhance productivity.

Properly planned training will achieve four major objectives for you:

1.) Communication

Planning to always communicate something new, or re-profiling old subjects to make them appear new at every meeting, dramatically reduces staff boredom and encourages enthusiastic attendance.

2.) Knowledge

Your best people are hungry for knowledge and your investment in their education makes their jobs more rewarding. Better-trained people generate more sales and contribute to higher customer satisfaction levels. 

3.) Motivation

Your regular employee meeting is also the ideal place to consistently reinforce and promote your company’s vision or mission.

4.) Entertainment…. yes, that’s right. Entertainment!

Entertainment, or a “Fun Factor”, is the secret ingredient to making sure the attendees are engaged.

Planning and executing effective training/sales meetings is a very difficult task to do on a regular ongoing basis. If your meetings are productive and effective, congratulations! If not and you would like some free tips, ENS Media has a list of “Do’s and Don’ts of Employee Meetings” which offers tips to help make your meetings more productive and entertaining.

The litmus test is to ask your staff how they feel about sales meetings. If they say you have too many or they are too long, they are in the 70 to 90% that think meetings are “usually a waste of time”!

If you would like to see our 9 Do’s and Don’ts for Productive Employee Meetings, click here to let us know and we will send it to you.

Train them and create a culture where they never want to leave.

Better Training = Better Sales!

When selling a new prospect advertising on your station, how long should it take to make the sale?

The correct answer is… as long as it takes, to do it right! Too fast or too slow can both have adverse effects. But in most cases, moving too fast can have greater long-term adverse effects than moving too slow. Patience, more often than not, is a virtue!

Keep in mind that media sales are different from automotive, furniture, or insurance sales. Advertising sales are business-to-business sales; if we lose the sale to a competitor or don’t make the sale today, there will nearly always be another opportunity in the near future. The automotive, furniture, insurance, and other like categories are business-to-consumer sales and the urgency is much greater. They understand that if they don’t get the sale today, the prospect may well be out of the market tomorrow. However, even with that said, the best salespeople, regardless of what they are selling, nearly always have patience.

In media sales, two factors determine how long you should take:

1)   The value of the client. Is it a long-term client or a short-term client? The more potential value the client has, the more patience you should have. Don’t rush in with ideas and plans that aren’t well-thought-out. Make sure you play your cards correctly. 

2)   How much time does the client/prospect need to trust you? Building “trust” takes time, and if they trust you at the point when they say yes to your plan, the chances are much greater that they will give your plan the time it needs to work. 

Even if they don’t trust you, they may buy from you once or twice, but without trust, the chances of them becoming long-term clients are very slim.

In our experience, a majority of the medium to large long-term contracts our team wrote took at least 3 months to close, and some took 6 months or more. The key is, once they bought into the ideas and plans that we had taken our time to create for them, they were committed and stayed with the program. 

18^th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said it best, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet”. It takes time to reap the rewards. 

When you find a potential client that has value, be patient with them. Take the time to come up with great ideas. Ask deeper questions. Show a keener interest in their business and use that time to build trust and rapport. Once they say yes, you’ll have them for a lifetime.

Patience is a virtue and patience pays!

We’ve all been there before. You’re out prospecting, walk into a business and there sits the “office gatekeeper”. Their job is to protect the decision-maker and to make it hard, if not impossible, for you to get through to them. Your job is to find out who the decision-maker is and if possible, meet them!

Let the game begin!

Having a specific and proven way to advance can be key to moving the process forward. Stumble your way through it, and the tenacious gatekeep wins.

You have three strategic alternatives to getting past these sales preventers:

1.) Go around them.

2.) Wait until they die or leave the company.

3.) Win them over.

In reality, option three, winning them over, is your only viable option. The process of winning over the gatekeeper begins with respect.

Before you even introduce yourself, say these words…“I hope that you can help me”, then pause … and wait for them to reply. Once they commit to helping, you’re halfway there. See, people love to help other people, and if you ask for their help, chances are they will do what they can. You’ve just softened the gatekeeper!

The gatekeeper can actually be a great supporter of you. Depending upon how well you treat them, they can play a major factor in determining if you get to see the decision-maker. They can also answer many questions for you, and you are more apt to get an answer if you ask for their help.  

Show them respect, ask their opinion, and above all ask … “I’m hopeful that you can help me?”

One last thing… on your way out, ALWAYS say to the gatekeeper, “Thank you for your HELP”!

Do you know what radio is really good at? It’s good at promoting other businesses, events, and even other entertainment mediums. I shouldn’t just say radio is good at it… we’re actually GREAT at it!

Now, let’s turn the table to what radio is bad at. We’re bad at promoting ourselves, our own advertising medium!!! Let me rephrase that… we’re not just bad at it, we suck at it!

That may seem a bit harsh, but as my dad said from time to time, sometimes the truth hurts!

A couple of years back, I wrote an article titled, If We Could Turn Back Time. It said that if the radio industry could turn back time there would be two things we should have done differently. One was to promote ourselves better, and two was to train our media reps better. That article spoke primarily to training our reps better. Today, I want to speak about promoting ourselves better from the advertising sales part of radio.

As I travel through many markets, small, medium, and large, there are several common things I hear on local radio stations like, follow us on Facebook, like us on Twitter, and tune into our podcast, but I rarely to almost never hear a message promoting what we sell – RADIO ADVERTISING! Why is this? We have FREE airtime, and we don’t use it to promote our own medium! This seems ludicrous!

Just imagine if radio stations across America never mentioned, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or listen to our podcast. Do you think they would be nearly as popular as they are? The answer is an emphatic, NO!!!

We (radio) gave them billions of dollars in free promotion. (We did the same for Amazon.) These are the same mediums that have taken billions of advertising dollars from radio and we still are promoting them constantly!

Ask yourself this question …what if we ran promo ads that spoke to our listeners, many of whom own businesses, handle the advertising, or are influencers to the aforementioned. Promo ads that have testimonials from satisfied advertisers, ads that talk about the correct, different, and better ways to advertise, messages that speak to the daily concerns a business owner deals with, and positive messages that simply promote the power of radio! If we all did this, do we think people would have a better perception of our industry as an advertising platform? The answer is an emphatic, YES!

If you’re not promoting your industry and your stations, you’re missing a great opportunity to establish yourself as the advertising expert in your market. We should not be ashamed of what we do, instead, we should promote the hell out of it and brag about what we do. Are you? If not, shame on you, and shame on radio because they have set a horrible example.

Self-promotion is a good thing! We should all be doing more of it! ENS on Sales is designed to give our readers ideas and tips to help media reps and managers be better at what they do. It’s also our promotional and marketing piece. Our SoundADvice program is the easiest, least expensive, and most powerful way to promote your stations or yourself.

If you want to learn more about how SoundADvice works and the pricing options, click here to arrange a quick call with Rick.

Here is what our satisfied SoundADvice subscribers have to say:

• “It was the ‘bridge’ I needed to get him to see I was there to HELP and not SELL. The SoundADvice was a great conversation piece and segway into getting Brad on the radio!” – Media Rep

• “More Training? All well and good but how ‘bout actually changing the landscape to make it easier for your well-trained sellers to succeed?  We’ve found SoundADvice is far and away the easiest, turn-key way to position yourself and your team as the local “go-to” experts. It’s true, when it comes to marketing ourselves, we don’t practice what we preach AND we’ve got the stations! I know you’re busy and more time-poor than ever. All the more reason to use SoundADvice. They do the heavy lifting. You reap the referrals.” – Sales Mgr

• “Not to swell your head but your SoundADvice has been invaluable to us over the past 2½ years. To end that relationship would be a letdown to our reps”. – General Mgr

• “Exciting news! A client of mine requested your last SoundADvice “How to Leverage Your Suppliers” and I visited with her today. I geared my proposal towards the issue and sold her a SIX-MONTH contract in January!” – Media Rep

• “I just wanted to share with you that I had a call from the manager of Grand Stay Hotel saying ‘Thank you’ for the inspirational messages through SoundADvice! She even forwarded it to their corporate headquarters, and they were impressed! That’s all from you, so I wanted you to know about it:) Thank you for all you do to help us!” – Media Rep

Very often, the only difference between a very successful salesperson and an unsuccessful salesperson is their ability to handle rejection.

The way you handle rejection is largely about selling yourself on the value you deliver. Here are some “mind game” strategies you might consider;

1.)   Develop the attitude that when a customer says “no”, they’re the loser, not you. Assuming you have put together a proposal in your prospect’s best interest, and purchasing your proposal will increase their sales, they’re the loser, not you. Pity the advertiser, not yourself, especially if their competitor ends up buying your idea.

2.)   Remember, you had nothing when you made the presentation, so you don’t lose anything when your prospect says “no”. You lived without that sale before and can live without that sale when your proposal is turned down. (That attitude also takes the pressure off you and helps you make a more relaxed and engaging presentation.)

3.)   To a degree, selling is simply a matter of math; more presentations equal more sales. Calculate your closing ratio, then get excited about each “no” as it’s one step closer to a yes, based on your closing ratio. For example, if your record indicates you’ve closed one in ten, you can get pretty excited on your ninth rejection in the knowledge that in all probability your next presentation will be a hit.

4.)   Take responsibility for “no”. No busy decision maker has agreed to sit still for a full presentation if they have no interest in what you are offering. Therefore, retrace your steps to determine where you did not meet or beat their expectations and use what you discover to arrange another presentation. The best salespeople learn from their mistakes.

5.)    Structure your presentations so your prospect is not saying “no” to you or your stations. Structure it so the “no” is only for that particular presentation or idea, thereby leaving the door open for another opportunity. 

6.)   Change your mission and definition of success. You have no absolute control over whether your prospect says yes or no. You do have complete control over the thought, strategy, and quality that goes into your presentation. Knowing you’ve made each presentation the best that it can be makes you feel like every presentation is a success, regardless of the outcome.

In sales, rejection happens. While we always want to remain positive, preparing ourselves for possible rejection will go a long way toward softening the blow. Using one or more of the six strategies will do just that.

Always remember, a “NO” puts you one step closer to a “YES”!